American Literature / Unit 19 AML 1820 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Drill 6: The Speaker's Response in "Richard Cory"
The idea
The board prints Robinson's "Richard Cory" whole and asks how the speaker's apparent response to the events can best be characterized, offering concern, bewilderment, malice, remorse and anger. The answer is bewilderment. Read the last stanza against the first three. The speaker spends twelve lines listing what made Cory enviable, then reports in two lines that he went home and put a bullet through his head, and offers no explanation at all. That refusal to explain is the response: a collective we that cannot reconcile the two halves. Malice, remorse and anger all require a reaction the poem never states, and concern is too mild and too forward-looking for a speaker reporting a completed event.
In practice
Twelve lines of envy, two of fact, no explanation.
Where people slip
The temptation is to pick the emotion you feel reading it. The question asks about the speaker, and the speaker's own silence after the bullet is the whole evidence.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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